hi. i have a problem. i want advice. y'dig?

i have an external harddrive. it has all my musical ideas for 2 years, a shitload of mp3s, my gf's entire mp3 collection and one massive heckload of porn on it. 200gb all in all.

today it was working fine, and then i went to shove a load of mp3s on a friends mac.

when i plugged it in, the mac said that mac osx couldn't see any folders on the hard drive or something. it asked me if i wanted to do something or other or if i wanted to just carry on. i chose to carry on, and the drive wasn't visible in the mac's "my computer" equiavlent bit. i unplug it and plug it back in again, same message about osx, again i dont let it do whatever crazy shit it wants to do. then it wants to do some kind of check thing and i let it. still doesn't read the drive so i unplug it.

i take it back to the PC that it had been running fine on 10 minutes earlier, and instead of being listed as an external drive, its called a Local Disk and when i try to access it it says that its not formatted and asks me if i want to format it. i say "heck no, thanx v. much" .

i unplug it and try again. same result.
i try it in another pc. same result.

i've deleted stuff off my external before, and it took time and made machiney noises. at no point today has it made such "wiping your life away" sounds.

theo mctheoface says that i should be able to take it to a computer shop place and they'll make it all better and i can have my life back.

is he right?
is there anythung else i can do?
how much should i expect such aid to cost me?
am i actually competely fucked?

thoughts please
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